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New Research on Overcoming Loneliness
The Wall Street Journal: I was feeling lonely one recent weekend. I craved company, but friends and family all seemed to be on vacation or busy. So I arranged to chat with a friend who lives in another city, signed up for a group kayak outing, and decided I’d take myself to Sunday brunch at a new restaurant nearby. Then I canceled my plans, ignored my phone when it rang and read for two days. It didn’t make me less lonely. I was relieved Monday morning when the rhythm of work started up again.
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The Aging Advantage
Pacific Standard: At the San Francisco offices of the global design firm IDEO, overlooking the blue expanse of San Francisco Bay, 150 people spend each workday bettering how we live by re-thinking everyday tangibles like IKEA kitchens, Tempur-Pedic mattresses, and, years ago, Crest toothpaste tubes. More recently, though, IDEO has started to think more widely about how we might engineer large cultural shifts in areas that aren’t traditionally thought of as “designable”—how we approach topics like religion, aging, and even death.
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After Trauma, New Strength as Well as New Scars
The Wall Street Journal: Who is happier, the winner of a lottery jackpot or someone confined to a wheelchair after an accident? The answer seems obvious—the lottery winner. But it isn’t that simple. For her 2013 doctoral thesis at Harvard, a young psychologist named H’Sien Hayward surveyed 50 individuals who had been paralyzed in accidents decades earlier, 50 lottery winners who had received an average prize of $6 million about a decade earlier, and a control group of 50 people who hadn’t experienced a major calamity or windfall.
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Frühchen sind später häufig arbeitslos (Preterm babies linked with less wealth)
The world: Are children born prematurely, they are later in life less economically successful. At least that is the result of a long-term study of the British University of Warwick near Coventry with more than 15,000 volunteers. The local group of researchers investigated the level of education, profession and the standard of living of 8573 people aged 42 years, who were born in 1958, and by 6698 people of the vintage 1970. These included both those who arrived early to the world as well as those that were not born prematurely.
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What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
Mother Jones: Leigh Robinson was out for a lunchtime walk one brisk day during the spring of 2013 when a call came from the principal at her school. Will, a third-grader with a history of acting up in class, was flipping out on the playground. He'd taken off his belt and was flailing it around and grunting. The recess staff was worried he might hurt someone. Robinson, who was Will's educational aide, raced back to the schoolyard. Will was "that kid." Every school has a few of them: that kid who's always getting into trouble, if not causing it. That kid who can't stay in his seat and has angry outbursts and can make a teacher's life hell. That kid the other kids blame for a recess tussle.
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The Economics Of Happiness And A Country’s Income Inequality
NPR: Money can't buy you happiness, right? That's the assumption we've always had, and it feels good to feel that way. It's also been held by something called the Easterlin paradox that happiness is about lots of other stuff. Well, it turns out the story might be a little more complicated. ... There's new work by Shigehiro Oishi - he's a psychologist at the University of Virginia - that adds a wrinkle to the Easterlin paradox. So he told me that the United States is itself an example of the Easterlin paradox at work. GDP in the U.S. has grown much faster than happiness levels.
